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“I’m fine,” Bianca said, using a tone that was meant to end the conversation.
She knew she should tell Eden about Elias, as she obviously had no idea that the two of them had become involved, but she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. The last thing Bianca wanted was to burst into tears in a public place and humiliate herself further. Everything was still so fresh and it was still too painful.
“I should probably go, though,” Bianca said, gathering herself.
“Yeah, you should get some rest,” Eden replied, sounding crestfallen.
“I’m so glad you’re okay,” Bianca said, giving her a hug.
“You forgive me?”
“Of course. I know this wasn’t your fault,” Bianca replied, letting her friend go and thinking that the only person Bianca could blame was herself for falling for Elias. For some reason, the comforting hug was instigating a fresh round of tears.
“Love you,” Eden said.
“Love you, too,” Bianca replied, scurrying out of there as fast as she could before she started crying again.
She saw the big SUV parked across the street and darted through traffic to get to it. She kept her head down so no one would see that her eyes were filling with tears. The driver got out and let her in the back and pulled into traffic smoothly while she wiped her eyes.
She noticed that there were two men in the front of the giant SUV. One in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger side. That was odd. They had gone a whole three blocks before she realized that they were headed the wrong way. She got a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“I think you need to turn around,” she told the driver hesitantly. “My brother’s building is that way.”
“We’re not going there,” the driver said in heavily accented English.
The two men were East Asian, and although Bianca wasn’t an expert at identifying where an accent was from, she guessed that it was a Mandarin accent.
A thrill of fear went down her spine when she recalled that she had walked to the coffee shop. She hadn’t been driven. She didn’t leave a note, saying where she was going. No one knew where she was.
“Turn around,” she said, pulling out her phone and dialing.
The man in the passenger seat suddenly lunged at her and grabbed her phone out of her hand. She lurched away from him, startled by his violent motion, and pressed herself up against the door, terrified that he was going to hit her.
“No phone,” he said, rolling down his window and tossing the phone out.
“Stop the car right now!” she yelled.
The two men looked at each other, said something in Mandarin, and laughed. The passenger rolled his window back up and tapped the glass. “Soundproof. Go ahead yell,” he said in broken English.
She thought about trying to bargain with them. Play the princess and ask them if they knew who she was, but she had a feeling they knew exactly who she was, how much money her family had, and what would happen to them if they got caught kidnapping her. Even with all that knowledge, they were obviously doing it anyway. There was no point in trying to bargain with them.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked, not really sure if knowing was going to assuage her fear or make it worse.
“There water there,” the driver said, looking back at her in the rearview mirror, and pointing down at the center console where there were two bottles of water in the cup holders. “You sit. Comfortable. No harm.”
“Where are you taking me?” she repeated.
The men laughed and said something to each other in Mandarin, and ignored her.
They headed west on the interstate, leaving the city behind them, and headed into suburban Massachusetts. For a moment she expected them to take the exit to Weston—she knew this must be somehow related to Ben Goh—but they drove right past Weston and kept going. The towns got smaller and the exits more spread out.
As time passed and the towns kept going by, she started to think less about where they were going or why they were doing this, and more about how difficult it was going to be to get back. She didn’t have her phone anymore, and she used an app on her phone to pay for almost everything. She didn’t have ID or cash or even jewelry on her that she could sell or trade for a ride back to the city. She had walked out of her brother’s apartment with no way to defend herself or get herself back to her family. She didn’t even think that the T came out this far, and of course, she had no idea about bus schedules. She had heard of a bus system in Western Massachusetts, but she’d never ridden it and currently had no money for it anyway.
The farther they went from the city, the less likely it was that she was going to be able to make it back home even if they pulled over and let her out. She was at their mercy, and the thought made her furious. Not with them. With herself. Something as simple as having a hundred-dollar bill slipped into her shoe or her bra at all times, just in case, and she wouldn’t be completely helpless.
There was a reason her brother had a driver and a bodyguard for her, and she had always viewed it as an inconvenience rather than a necessary precaution because she didn’t take her position in the world seriously. She tried not to think about her personal safety because she saw it as a limitation to her freedom. She just got into the back of any old SUV that pulled up in front of her. She had been holed up at her brother’s, hadn’t gone home in days, and her brothers wouldn’t have thought that she would want to leave in the state she was in. Why would they have a car for her?
But for someone who was watching her, hoping she’d mess up at some point, they had an easy job. All they would have to know is that she was so accustomed to other people keeping her safe that she literally got into any big car that pulled up in front of her. She was so easy to kidnap it’s amazing it hadn’t happened before.
